Details of the checkout operations logs are useful for educating and monitoring employees, shoppers and managers. Retailers need to ensure that checkout station employees are complying with an enterprise best practices model. With existing approaches, however, these tools are informal and not-scalable. Also, failure to comply with best practices can result in lower throughput, customer dissatisfaction, damage to merchandise, damage to property, cashier and/or customer injury, etc.
A transaction log (TLOG) can be monitored to guess or estimate a degree of compliance (for example, one can analyze actual scans per minute versus ideal scans per minute). However, the TLOG does not contain purely visual content (that is, any behavior that does not have a corresponding transactional entry), such as the position or orientation of people around the checkout station.
Also, if a human directly observes the cashier, the cashier's behavior may change as the result of being observed. More problematic is the fact that a supervisor likely has other duties, has a limited ability to maintain sustained attention and cannot observe every cashier at all work hours. Additionally, as the number of lanes to monitor increases, examining all of these events becomes disadvantageously time-consuming.